Raccoon


The word raccoon is concluded to bring the meaning to us of an animal that rubs, scrubs, and scratches with his hands.  That sounds like something you do every day, isn’t it?   Evidently when in captivity they like to wash their food before they eat it. They live in a large area of  North America and some also live in Europe.  They like to have trees around their habitat and climb them for security and safety, but they like to burrow in the ground for their winter home and to keep their babies safe from predators.  Their favorite places are by the streams and rivers and lakes where they can catch fish and other water creatures.  They are great for raiding the huge cornfields that man plants and they enjoy the corn at the fresh juicy stage of their growth so a lot of corn goes to feeding raccoons.  This slow masked cute little creature will eat all kinds of bugs as well but when the fruit comes on the trees he will scramble to get his share too.  If you leave some groceries outside your door you can be sure that if there are raccoons around they will sample your contents of the shopping bags.  

On one of our camping excursions we had left some loaves of  bread in the trailer and however the raccoons were able to get in there they had a good bite of bread.  They are intelligent animals and are able to open many different kinds of doors.

  The warm and extra thick fur that they grow keeps them cozy in the winter’s freezing temperatures and is very much prized by the human race and is a specialty for hats and coats so that millions upon millions of raccoons have been trapped and killed for their fur as well as for eating.

Some females will live in the same area.  A few males will live in a group and mark out their territory.  The mother will have two to five little ‘kits’ or “cubs” as they are called and mother will care for them, for the father has nothing to do with them.  When the babies are big enough to fend for themselves the mother will send them away  to find their own den.

There were some people that had some raccoons and for some reason they decided to put them in a car for a while.  They must have been very frantic and nervous or mad.  Whatever the problems was those raccoons ripped up everything in that car and made a total disaster of the inside.  You can imagine how the people felt.






 


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Raccoon Hand